These basic physical changes to the urban landscape alter the way that solar energy is absorbed by the land... one of the net effects being that the air near the ground in core urban areas can be considerably hotter than suburban or rural places...
When we start to look ahead to how cities will feel with the combined effects of climate change thrown on top, urban planners and municipal decision-makers start to get nervous about how to keep their cities livable into the future.

There is a certain irony in our chemical legacy, a tragedy of unintended consequences. The invention of these substances solved definitive problems that concretely benefited people... Yet the more enduring effect of these chemicals will likely be not only their continued presence long into the future, but the long-lasting environmental damages they have wrought.

Yet watching these giant plumes of CO2 rising from the surface, one couldn’t help but think the truly enormous volcanoes on Earth are our cities. From space, most of us seem to go about our lives inside the rims of volcanoes – ones we ourselves have made.